Two Brits Stew: Lars Iyer’s Dogma

Related Books:

Dogma is the second in a projected trilogy by Lars Iyer. Like its predecessor, Spurious, this book is surreal, brainy, plotless, and arguably pointless. It is also brilliantly written and very funny. The only problem is that, in wondering who else might enjoy it, I couldn’t think of anyone I know to whom I could give an unqualified recommendation. True, that might suggest something about the kind of people I hang around with, but I can’t help noticing that it suggests something about these books too. They’re certainly not for everyone. In fact, I fear that relating to these characters might be a warning — the fading canary in the mental health coalmine.

Dogma, like Spurious, is told entirely through the interactions of Lars and W., a pair of philosophy lecturers and writers locked in a strange semblance of friendship. Though they live on opposite sides of England, they have frequent phone calls, visit each other, and even travel together. Sometimes W.’s girlfriend Sal is in tow, but it’s usually just the two of them, operating like a combination between Waiting for Godot and Withnail and I.

Early on, the men embark on a lecture tour of the southern United States, and it appears for a flickering moment that the book might contain a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe character arcs too. But that plotline goes cold pretty quickly. Iyer isn’t interested in starting in one place and ending up in another. Instead of developing, his characters circle the drain — a fitting arrangement for a pair who obsess about entropy while seemingly doing their best to embody the concept.

They share an incredible inventory of obsessions: the end of the world, the connection between religion and capitalism. They love the mysterious Texan musician Jandek and the slightly less weird Texan musician Josh T. Pearson. W. can’t stop talking about Franz Rosenzweig, and frequently wonders if God’s existence can be proven through higher mathematics read in the original German. They obsess over the relationship between Kafka and Max Brod, the friend who made Kafka posthumously famous, repeatedly asking of themselves and one another which of them might be Kafka to the other’s Brod. W. can’t stop talking about the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, and, in particular the film Werckmeister Harmonies.

This isn’t merely a list of preoccupations. They’re practically fetishes, ground to be covered again and again. Repetition is somehow key to Iyer’s project. When the men decide to start a new intellectual movement of somewhat unclear underpinnings and call it “Dogma,” W. devises the rules and then repeats them, revising and elaborating on them. The effect of so much repetition is that the sequence of the book — which is divided into many small sections of just a few pages each — is all but irrelevant. Dogma reads almost like a collage, a fitting style for a book more concerned with philosophy than narrative.

Ideas drive everything. Lars and W.’s biggest fear is that they are cursed with the ability to recognize and appreciate important intellectual contributions, but are unable to make significant contributions of their own. Or — somewhat more poignantly — they fear they’ve actually had their great ideas and forgotten them, or that their great ideas passed in conversation without either of them realizing it. The reader is put in the position of wondering the same thing as he reads. Have I missed the point in all this?

Iyer employs the first-person perspective with fantastic flair and originality. The narrator, Lars, reveals himself almost exclusively through the words of his friend and says practically nothing about himself directly. It would be challenging, if not impossible, to find a page in Dogma which does not contain the words “W. says.” This narrative choice is especially interesting given that W.’s primary mode of communication with Lars is scathing criticism, of his weight, his clothes, this apathy, his failure to do good work or to think deeply. In a late scene, W. wishes for Lars to join him at a meeting with his employers, with whom he has developed an adversarial relationship. “Why not take a lawyer, I ask him. He’s allowed to. No, he wants the equivalent of an idiot child, W. says. He wants the equivalent of a diseased ape with scabs round his mouth throwing faeces around the room….Did you see who he had with him?, they’ll say. What he had with him? My God, we shouldn’t make his life any worse: that’s what they’ll say, W. says. And perhaps then they’ll show mercy.” Relentless and very funny, the abuse never seems to bother Lars, who receives it in a state of either bemusement or agreement — it’s never clear which.

When, years ago, Roger Ebert reviewed W.’s favorite movie, Werckmeister Harmonies, he described it as “maddening if you are not in sympathy with it, mesmerizing if you are.” It’s a perfect characterization of Dogma’s protagonists. “We’ve become strange, W. says. We’ve spent too much time in each other’s company… We’re no longer fit for human society, W. says.” He’s almost right, I’m afraid. But not quite. I don’t know who else might like this strange book as much as I did, but, as for me, I can’t wait for the third.

1. Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905. Her life was the stuff of fiction: she was a best-selling debut novelist at twenty-six, published a second bestseller a year later, was blacklisted by the Nazi regime and in exile by the spring of 1936. She drifted through Europe in the company of various other anti-Nazi intellectuals, stateless, driven from country to country by financial and immigration difficulties. A shadow existence that took her across the continent and briefly to the United States, where she traveled in 1938 and left, Geoff Wilkes reports in his excellent afterward to the new English-language edition of her novel After Midnight (more on that later), because she was unable to secure anything more permanent than a tourist visa. She published several more novels in exile and was in the Netherlands when the war broke out.
She could find no exit out of Europe, and when the Netherlands fell, she took a remarkable step: she somehow managed to convince a German officer to issue her a passport in the name of Charlotte Tralow (her middle name and her married name, although she had divorced Johannes Tralow in 1937), either initiated the story that she’d committed suicide or allowed the rumor to spread unchecked or had someone falsely report her death — the precise details of the pseudocide are unknown — and slipped back into Nazi Germany. In August 1940, the British Daily Telegraph reported that she’d killed herself in Amsterdam. She lived out the war with her parents in Cologne.
Until recently, Keun’s work has been difficult to find in English. (Having encountered the story of her fascinating life only in essays, I’m tempted to learn German just to read her biography.) But then, this year, a wonderful development: two independent publishers have just released English editions of two of her books. The Artificial Silk Girl just came out from Other Press, while Melville House has released After Midnight. (A third Keun novel, Child of all Nations, was published by Overlook Press in 2009.)
“She's an immensely important writer,” Melville House Publisher founder and publisher Dennis Loy Johnson said in a recent statement, “and it's a crime that she was forgotten for decades and had to be rediscovered.”
2.
Irmgard Keun was possessed of a spectacular talent. She managed to convey the political horrors she lived through with the lightest possible touch, even flashes of humor. The Artificial Silk Girl and After Midnight make for an interesting pair. The former was her bestselling second novel, published in 1932. The Los Angeles Times called it “a truly charming window into a young woman’s life in the early 1930’s,” which is somewhat startling to me; the young woman in question is vastly appealing and, yes, charming as a narrator, but the book’s only truly charming if you like your charm dark.
Doris, a beautiful and somewhat dim nineteen-year-old who aspires to a life of luxury and film stardom, embarks on a tour of the bedrooms of the Weimar Republic in pursuit of a level of glamour that she cannot possibly obtain on her own. The Artificial Silk Girl chronicles her long slow drift from reasonably respectable secretary in Cologne to homeless waif in Berlin, and the drift is harrowing. She’s a slightly unhinged figure, a girl who will literally starve before she’ll sell the expensive fur that she stole from a coat check at the beginning of her descent. (Although, in all fairness, the fur seems to be her only friend. She gives it a Christmas present.) The fur represents the life she longs for. She’ll never let it go.
She is frighteningly blind to the political storms that surround her. An industrialist she was dating has recently dropped her, for instance, “all because of politics.” Doris hates politics. She’s willing to be almost anything a man requires her to be, but in this particular conversation, she misunderstood his intent: “So he asks me if I’m Jewish too. My God, I’m not — but I’m thinking: if that’s what he likes, I’ll do him the favor — and I say: ‘Of course — my father just sprained his ankle at the synagogue last week.’”
The novel is presented as her diary. Doris struggles to write her own script, which she expects will chronicle a fast rise into film stardom and unfathomable glamour, but she can’t grasp hold of the narrative arc and flounders in a life lived out in episodes. Recent comparisons have been made toSex and the City, but Doris reminds me of no one so much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s leading couple in The Beautiful and Damned; she will endure any number of humiliations in order to avoid the indignity of working for a living. She’s convinced of her own specialness — “And I think it will be a good thing if I write everything down, because I’m an unusual person” — and her understanding of the world is that all she needs to do is remain beautiful and available, and the right man will sweep her up into an extraordinary life. It’s an exhausting pursuit — “I want to bury my face in my hands to make it less sad. It has to work so hard, because I’m trying to become a star. And there are women all over the place, whose faces are also working hard.”
The book has an oddly timeless quality, with sharp-edged and still-relevant observations about the impossibility of societal standards of beauty and success, and about certain hypocrisies surrounding sex and money:
If a young woman from money married an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for hours and has this pious look on her face, she’s called a German mother and a decent woman. If a young woman without money sleeps with a man with no money because he has smooth skin and she likes him, she’s a whore and a bitch.
Paragraphs like that one helped The Artificial Silk Girl and its author run afoul of the more conservative elements of the German literary establishment. Geoff Wilkes cites Kurt Herwarth Ball’s 1932 review of the novel, “which castigated Doris’s unconventional morality, and concluded by adjuring Keun to ‘write in a German spirit, speak in a German spirit, think in a German spirit, and refrain from her sometimes almost vulgar aspersions against German womanhood.’”
Write, speak, and think in a German spirit? My God. Which spirit? Whose Germany? It’s hard to conceive of a less tolerable demand for an artist as ferociously independent and intellectually able as Keun seems to have been. Speaking as a novelist, I’m not sure I want to think about the fury I would feel if a critic had the nerve to tell me how to think.
3.There are surface similarities between The Artificial Silk Girl and After Midnight. Both works are narrated by very young women attempting to navigate the fraught landscape of Germany in the years preceding the Second World War. But these are wildly different books: The Artificial Silk Girl was published in 1932, After Midnight in 1937, and that span of years was not trivial. After Midnight, published in exile after Keun fled the Nazis, is a darker, more driving, and to my eye more accomplished work.
After Midnight ostensibly takes place over the course of a single evening leading up to a catastrophic and climactic party, but easily integrated flashbacks and digressions flesh out the characters’ pasts. By 1937 a fictional character who was entirely oblivious to politics was less plausible, and Sanna, the narrator, is anything but indifferent. She is intelligent and observant, she is watching the country go mad around her, and she lives a life of quiet, unbearable strain. Her friend Gerti struggles as much as Sanna does, but she’s less able to contain herself; she’s prone to fury and coming a little undone, reckless to the point of insulting SS officers in bars. Gerti is in love with a half-Jewish boy. Sanna accompanies the couple sometimes in public:
…so that the impression they make in the bar won’t be quite so dangerous. I don’t like doing this, and I always feel very foolish. I could weep with the worry of it. They’re both so pretty and so nice, and they may be hauled off to jail tomorrow. Why are they so crazy? I can’t understand it. Other people dance, but they can’t. The radio is playing string music, soft as a feather bed. Bright light shimmers in the wine. The wine is sour, but they are drinking hot, bright radiance.
The prose is gorgeous. Life continues, in all its beauty and complexity and love and friendship, but the cage doors of the police state have closed over it and the world has ceased to make any sense, the world is unspeakably dangerous; saying the wrong thing, expressing the wrong thought, being seen with the wrong person can mean death. Sanna lives in Frankfurt with her brother and sister-in-law, because she had to flee Cologne after her horrendous future mother-in-law reported her to the Gestapo. She did this ostensibly because Sanna mentioned her distaste for Nazi radio addresses, but also, Sanna can’t help but realize, because it’s in the woman’s best financial interests for Sanna not to marry her son. Reporting on one’s fellow citizens is often a matter of convenience. A shopkeeper effectively shuts down a competitor by reporting imaginary subversive activity to the police.
The screams of the tortured spill out of a prison on a certain trolley route. The tension is unspeakable: “I feel tired. Today was so eventful, and such a strain. Life generally is, these days. I don’t want to do any more thinking. In fact I can’t do any more thinking. My brain’s all full of spots of light and darkness, circling in confusion.”
It’s tempting, although perhaps too easy, to project Sanna’s desperation on another young woman. Irmgard Keun writes movingly and convincingly of the unbearable stress of life in the Third Reich, and she knew of what she spoke. Keun survived the Nazis, but the cost was steep. In her years drifting through Europe in the late thirties, Wilkes reports, she confided in letters that she was cutting herself.
“This dictatorship has made Germany a perfect country,” one despairing writer tells another in the final third of After Midnight,
“and a perfect country doesn’t need writers. There’s no literature in Paradise. Can’t have writers without imperfection around them, can’t have poets. The purest of lyric poets needs to yearn for perfection. Once you’ve got perfection, poetry stops. Once criticism’s no longer possible, you have to keep quiet.”
But Keun never did. She railed all her life against authors who deferred to the Nazi regime, and had the audacity to sue the Gestapo for loss of earnings after her work was confiscated in 1933. (Unsurprisingly, this went nowhere.) She continued to write and publish after the war, although never quite with the success or the dizzying prolificacy of her early years. She enjoyed a second wave of literary fame when her novels were reissued in the late 1970s, and died in 1982. Her work stands as a brilliant record of the era she survived.

5 comments:

“I fear that relating to these characters might be a warning — the fading canary in the mental health coalmine.”

Ha ha. I love this…

It’s an oddly glorious feeling when you love something (a book, a movie) but you also realize that your love might be a sign of derangement as much as aesthetic taste. It’s the same appeal as finding a friend who shares your bizarre obsessions (stamp collecting, a sexual fetish, JFK conspiracy theories—it doesn’t matter) and you know you’re both slightly sick, but it’s such a delight to share the sickness!

The Known World feels like a book that took a long time to write. The writing proceeds at a slow but churning pace. Jones meticulously ties each character to one another, to the land, to the curious circumstances of the "peculiar institution" of slavery. We are taught in school that slavery was a black and white affair, but Jones takes great pains to describe a human landscape where such distinctions are blurry: the most powerful man in Manchester County, William Robbins, dotes upon the two children he has fathered with his slave, Philomena; Oden, the Indian, exaggerates his cruelty towards blacks to maintain his tenuous superiority; and Henry Townsend, the gifted young black man at the center of this novel, acquires a plantation full of slaves from which discord flows, imperceptibly at first. The lesson is the messiness of slavery made real by the vivid lives of each character. Over the course of the novel, Jones sketches out each character, from birth to death, using deft flashbacks and flash-forwards that are scattered throughout like crumbs and give the book a marvelous depth. In this sense, the book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez'sOne Hundred Years of Solitude. The book ends before the Civil War begins, and so the triumph of good over evil is not allowed to mitigate the brutal picture of slavery that Jones paints. Perhaps because it was so assiduously researched, this novel feels like history and it feels like life. Here's hoping that Jones' next one doesn't take ten years to write.